"The Rest of Our Lives" by Ben Markovits

Shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize.

Twelve years ago, Tom's wife, Amy, had an affair. He decided then that he would leave their children had left home. Now he is driving daughter, Miriam, from the environs of New York to university in Pittsburgh. After settling her in ... he keeps driving westward, visiting his brother and an ex-girlfriend, as well as others, before ending up in Los Angeles with his son.

It's a road trip novel, whose antecedents include Jack Kerouac's On the Road. Like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M Pirsig, TRoOL parallels the physical journey with a psychological journey into the memories of the narrator. Like Rabbit, Run by John Updike, the protagonist is representative of middle-class America (though in this case upper-middle-class) and considers the ins and outs of marital problems with a didactic frankness. Another echo of this novel is that both protagonists were basketball players in their youth.

There are two other plot lines that run parallel to his reminiscences. The first is that he is growing increasingly ill - he thinks it is long Covid. The second is that he has been suspended from his law school because he got involved in a dispute where a basketball club owner was accused of discriminatory practices. He is becoming redundant as an old white male, refusing to use the standardised pronoun sign-off on  his email. On his journey, he meets a white player who wants to sue the basketball authorities because of the under-representation of white players in the top flight of basketball and seeks the narrator as representative. 

I found it difficult to get involved in the story for two reasons. Firstly, the style of the prose which is matter of fact to the point where much is told rather than shown. Secondly, there were so many culturally-specific references to American life that I began to long for footnotes. I am sure that this increases the verisimilitude of the novel for an American audience, but it led to me feeling alienated and consequently less empathetic towards the protagonist-narrator. Sometimes, I understood the reference, after long immersion in Hollywood movies and US TV shows and novels, such as "We obviously had ... a C-minus marriage, which makes it pretty hard to score much higher than a B overall on the rest of your life." (Ch 1) which references the American school grading system. I am struggling to catch up when a character "graduated salutatorian, and even got elected Homecoming Princess" (Ch 1) When the narrator starts talking about baseball or basketball (and he seems, like so many Americans at least in novels, utterly obsessed with sport) I am hopelessly lost and I don't really care.

It also had that thing that quirk typical to American novels in which character is exemplified through  possessions, menu choices, and particularly clothing:

• "He wore a Foegley Landscape short-sleeved collared shirt." (Ch 2) He is a very minor character, a walk-on part, and yet what he wears appears to be important. Presumably 'Foegley Landscape' is a brand.
• "Betty had on black leggings and Nike running shoes, with a neon yellow swoosh; she wore an oversized men's shirt." (Ch 3)

Selected quotes:

• "I started signing off with he/I/mine ... I don't like being referred to in the accusative. It literally objectifies I." (Ch 1)
• "All that was thirty-five years ago. Ar a certain point with these family dynamics, you'd think the stature of limitations would run out." (Ch 2)
• "Nobody tells you what an intense experience loneliness is, how it has a lot of variations." (Ch 2)
• "The whole afternoon had a post-nap flavour of unreality." (Ch 2)
• "It's a funny thing to be driven by your son, you feel the power dynamic shifting." (Ch 3)
• "That look you get from flying, where you put up a front all day, and the front gets a bit dented." (Ch 3)

The reviews, for example that of the Sunday Telegraph which claimed the novel "Packs a serious emotional punch" left me mystified. True, the plot ends up in a life-or-death situation for the narrator. But I found it difficult to identify with an upper-middle-class American man and the prose had failed to engage me so, actually, I was an observer to the crisis rather than a participant; fundamentally, I didn't really care.

January 2026; 239 pages

First published in the UK by Faber & Faber 2025

My paperback edition was issued in 2025

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God